Engaging With Literature: A Workshop for Teachers, Grades 3-5 can help you create the kind of classroom where all students interact with literature successfully. They dive into books as if they were going on a grand adventure, living within the story world and trying out its ideas from many different perspectives, and finally emerging from their experience to evaluate the text and its author from their informed vantage point.

This workshop features eight teachers working with students in grades 3 -5, all at different levels in their careers. They represent an assortment of schools serving a variety of students throughout the country at the third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade levels. These teachers talk about both philosophical and practical matters, bringing the audience into their classrooms to see their ideas in action.

There, we see their students making predictions, following hunches, using logic, recalling past experiences with life and in literature—all in an effort to create a unique and complex mental picture of the text. Dr. Judith Langer , the Director of the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement, calls these pictures envisionments. She first identified these processes of involved learning through a decade of research throughout the country with students of all ages.